Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto," a violent capture-and-escape movie set 500 years ago in the territory of a fictional Mayan city-state, ends ironically when European explorers arrive and interrupt the final bloody chase.

The surprise appearance of the Europeans was good news for Gibson's hero – distracting his last pursuers – but, as history tells us, the arrival of the Europeans actually escalated the New World's violence, bringing a more mechanized form of slaughter that devastated the Mayas and other native populations.

An even greater irony, however, may be that the U.S. media has done a better job separating fact from fiction about Gibson's movie than in explaining to Americans how some of their most admired modern politicians, including Ronald Reagan, were implicated in a more recent genocide against Mayan tribes in Central America.

America's bloody march through history puts today's actions of our government into perspective. This is how America relates to the world...

Yes, I just read a review about this latest abomination by Mel Gibson. He has shown himself to be a racist, once again. According the review I read, he portrays the Mayans as depraved, evil murderers. Apparently, this is a common theme amongst right-wing fundamentalist Christians. I guess this is their way of justifying the genocide perpetrated upon native Central Americans by the bloodthirsty Christian European conquerors.

I will not spend my money to watch such a travesty. Instead, if you wish to learn about that period in Central America, and be entertained, read the excellent historical novel Aztec, by Gary Jennings.

Let's get some perspective here, perhaps. We ALL committed genocide, in case you haven't noticed where did the Native Americans go? We killed them and took their land. Was it morally wrong, absolutely, but it was also something that has been done at various points in time by every single ethnic group and civilization on the planet.

What we did is simply human nature, like any large territorial predator we found a territory inhabited by those less able to defend themselves than us and drove them from it to expand our own. Regardless of its moral nature that is simply what we do as creatures, no different than any other.

However do not turn the MesoAmerican civilizations into some idealized romantic noble savage myth. As civilizations go they were among the most systematically brutal in history. Sacrificing thousands of people each year to their gods in any one of those city-states. Their very institutions were built around human sacrifice in a way other civilizations never got close to.

Were we Europeans brutal, absolutely, and we committed the greatest spree of genocide in the history of the world. Largely depopulating one entire continent and completely subjugating another with some of the most heinous methods ever recorded. But each and every one of us in the New World lives on the atrocities of our ancestors and we have profited from it. Nor can anyone else stand on a high-horse about it without being a hypocrite because what we did was no more than any other people have done at some point in their history. We simply acted on a larger scale.

In short the good and evil of it are meaningless, it's just part of our nature, and will continue to be so long as we are human.

_________________I am disillusioned enough to believe nothing will get any better yet compelled to make the attempt regardless